Each month, we’ll be featuring a member of the Curation Health team on our blog. Our hope is that by pulling back the curtain and providing insight on the people powering Curation Health, readers can get a better understanding of the passion, commitment, and diversity of the experts tirelessly serving our provider and payer partners day-in and day-out.
For the first of our team spotlight series, we sat down with our founder and CEO, Kevin Coloton, to better understand the roots of Curation Health.
Tell our audience about yourself.
My background is different than many in that I started in the clinical world as a physical therapist (PT). I worked at Johns Hopkins doing PT for a number of years. I also worked in a variety of consulting roles with The Advisory Board Company and Deloitte, and even spent time as a hospital administrator within the John Hopkins Health System.
My wife is a physician, and she did her residency in Minnesota. We moved to Minnesota and I took a role at Target [the retailer]. It was an amazing opportunity to understand the power of standardization and their unique approach to healthcare.
The last work experience that I had before founding Curation Health was at Clinovations, which is a DC-based consulting firm. I was one of the founding partners of the group that was focused on electronic health record optimization. Along our journey, we found an organization that had customized their Epic installation to prompt physicians to perform HCC recapture. The Advisory Board acquired Clinovations and I stayed on for a number of years. Our early value-based care experiences at Clinovations fostered the concept for the work we are now doing at Curation Health.
Why did you name the company Curation Health?
Our goal at Curation Health is to simplify information – to distill it down into actionable insights that are curated for the needs of a provider. Curation Health does not deliver noisy data to clinicians, but actual information that is curated so they can trust and use it to improve patient care and streamline their transition to value-based care.
We know you are adamant about value-based care being a workflow issue vs. a technology issue. Can you speak more to that?
Today, there’s a tendency to create technology and apply that technology solution in order to search for a problem to solve. The challenge is, is it actually fixing a tactical issue? And can it be applied to solve that problem?
Before we launched, I did a walk-about and met with lots of high-performing healthcare organizations that are doing full value-based care. I found that each did things very differently. One of the central things that they each focused on, though, was protecting the physician much like the quarterback in football. Instead of creating a technology that’s searching for a problem, we started with the opposite equation where we focused on the provider and optimized their clinical workflow.
From your perspective, what areas of healthcare will experience the most change in the year ahead?
Telemedicine comes top of mind. As we dig into 2021, more and more healthcare organizations now have telemedicine as one of their core care delivery segments. In years past, it was always the secondary or tertiary strategy for them – not anymore.
Also, addressing clinician burnout will be mission-critical this year. The pandemic has stretched already stressed clinicians too far. This year, I think we’ll see an increased focus on ensuring clinicians have the support and technology that they require to drive quality care while reducing administrative burden.
What do you consider when you hire?
My obsession is simplifying healthcare wherever I can so I am always looking for strategic hires that embody that same passion. More so, superior intellect simply isn’t enough. A Curation Health team member needs to be a strong collaborator and work with others to create unique solutions for our clients. It is essential for candidates to align with our culture and live our values.
